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15 countries that no longer exist and what replaced them

A tour of 15 countries that no longer exist, erased by war, revolution or peaceful union, and the nations that replaced them

Borders drawn on a map imply a permanence they have never earned. In the past century alone, dozens of sovereign states vanished — countries with their own currencies, passports, armies and seats at the United Nations or the League of Nations. Some ended in a single night, when a capital fell. Others dissolved slowly, their ministries and central banks absorbed piece by piece until the old name survived only on stamps and in atlases.

Countries that no longer exist matter well beyond map trivia. Whatever replaced them inherited the debts, treaties, minority populations and unsettled claims left behind, and those inheritances still shape the news. The breakup of Yugoslavia explains why Serbia and Kosovo remain locked in a dispute over recognition. The Soviet collapse explains the contested borders at the center of the war in Ukraine. Mandate lines drawn in the 1920s, for empires that have since disappeared, explain a great deal about Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Countries end in a handful of distinct ways. A federation can fragment into many successor states, as the Soviet Union did into 15 and Yugoslavia did into seven. Two neighbors can merge into one, as North Yemen and South Yemen did in 1990 and as Tanganyika and Zanzibar did in 1964. A smaller state can be swallowed by a larger one, through invasion, referendum or negotiated accession. And a government can rename the country it governs, which is how Burma became Myanmar in 1989 — a change some governments and news organizations still decline to adopt.

None of this is distant history. Czechoslovakia divided into Czechia and Slovakia on January 1, 1993. The Soviet Union formally dissolved just over a year earlier. Newfoundland was a self-governing British dominion before it voted to join Canada in 1949. The 15 entries that follow cover how each state ended and exactly what took its place, from empires that collapsed after World War I to unions that failed in under four years. The pace of border change has slowed since 1945. It has not stopped.

The Soviet Union split into 15 independent nations

The Soviet Union formally dissolved on December 26, 1991, and 15 independent countries took its place: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Each had been a constituent republic of the union.

The USSR was founded in 1922 on territory inherited from the Russian Empire, after the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War. By the mid-1980s its command economy had stalled. The reforms Mikhail Gorbachev introduced under the banners of glasnost and perestroika loosened central control without reviving growth. National movements in the republics, strongest in the Baltics and the Caucasus, used the opening to press for sovereignty.

A hardline coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991 collapsed within three days and left the central government with little authority. In December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met at Belovezhskaya Pushcha and declared that the union had ceased to exist. The Alma-Ata Protocol, signed December 21, brought most of the remaining republics into the agreement. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin that evening.

Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, was recognized as the continuing state for legal purposes. It took the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council, assumed the union's foreign debt and absorbed the bulk of its nuclear arsenal. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan transferred the warheads on their territory to Russia, a process tied to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on security assurances.

The successor states then diverged. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which treat the Soviet period as an occupation rather than a legitimate union, joined NATO and the European Union in 2004. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan developed as resource exporters with concentrated executive power. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, a war whose roots lie in borders and populations the 1991 breakup left unresolved.

Yugoslavia broke apart into seven countries

Yugoslavia disappeared in stages between 1991 and 2008, replaced by seven states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia held six republics with different languages, faiths and histories inside one federation, led until his death in 1980 by Josip Broz Tito.

Slovenia and Croatia both declared independence on June 25, 1991. Slovenia broke away after roughly 10 days of fighting with the Yugoslav People's Army. Croatia needed four years, as Serb-held districts proclaimed their own breakaway state before Croatian forces retook most of that territory in 1995.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's declaration in 1992 brought the worst of the violence. Fighting there lasted until late 1995 and included the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. The Dayton Agreement, negotiated at an air base in Ohio and signed in Paris that December, ended the war and gave Bosnia the two-entity structure it still uses. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, tried cases from these conflicts from 1993 until it closed in 2017.

Macedonia left the federation in 1991 without a war, then spent 28 years in a dispute with Greece over its name. The Prespa Agreement settled the argument, and the country became North Macedonia in February 2019.

Serbia and Montenegro remained joined, first as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and from 2003 as a looser state union, until Montenegrin voters chose independence in a May 2006 referendum. Kosovo, administered by the United Nations after the 1999 NATO air campaign against Serbia, declared independence in February 2008. Serbia, Russia, China and five EU member states still refuse to recognize it, which keeps Kosovo out of the UN.

European Union membership has come unevenly. Slovenia joined in 2004 and Croatia in 2013. The others remain candidates or potential candidates, their progress tied to disputes the federation never settled.

Czechoslovakia split peacefully into Czechia and Slovakia

Czechoslovakia ceased to exist at midnight on January 1, 1993, dividing into two sovereign states: the Czech Republic, now officially Czechia, and Slovakia. The separation, known as the Velvet Divorce, was negotiated between politicians over a matter of months and completed without fighting or a contested border.

The country had been assembled in 1918 from the Czech and Slovak lands of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nazi Germany dismembered it in 1938 and 1939. It was restored after World War II and ruled by the Communist Party from 1948 until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 carried Václav Havel into the presidency.

Free elections in June 1992 produced two incompatible mandates. Václav Klaus and his Civic Democratic Party won the Czech lands on a program of rapid market liberalization. Vladimír Mečiar and the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia won on a promise of greater Slovak autonomy and a slower economic transition. The two men met repeatedly that summer and concluded that a looser federation would not hold. No referendum was ever held, so neither electorate voted directly on breaking up the state. Havel resigned in July 1992 rather than preside over the dissolution, then returned in early 1993 as the first president of independent Czechia.

Federal assets were divided roughly two to one, matching a population of about 10 million Czechs and 5 million Slovaks. The shared currency lasted weeks before each country issued its own koruna in February 1993.

Their economies diverged, then converged. Czechia drew early foreign investment through Škoda Auto at Mladá Boleslav and an established industrial base. Slovakia lagged through the 1990s before building a car industry that turns out more vehicles per person than any other country, with plants run by Volkswagen in Bratislava, Kia near Žilina, Stellantis $STLA -1.50% in Trnava and Jaguar Land Rover in Nitra.

Czechia entered NATO in 1999, Slovakia in 2004. Both joined the European........

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